"Young Barack Obama in Love: A Girlfriend's Secret Diary" is the appetite-whetting page title of Vanity Fair's extract from Barack Obama: The Story, by David Maraniss, which is out this month. But it really isn't "salacious and prurient", as the New York Times columnist Charles Blow immediately tweeted. If Obama's opponents seek to use the diaries to embarrass the president, there's only one real line of attack: pretentiousness.

As a 22-year-old Columbia graduate, it turns out, Barack Obama was very much the 22-year-old Columbia graduate. Writing to one girlfriend, Alex McNear, he observes:

… the dichotomy [that TS Eliot] maintains is reactionary, but it's due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance ... And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter – life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot's irreconcilable ambivalence; don't you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

And right on cue, here's John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine:

BREAKING: Young Barack Obama was incredibly pretentious.

It's actually a fascinating and moving piece and you should read it; the letters and the secret diary in question are a testament both to the complexities of Obama's character, and to the fact that to become the president of the United States, you need to start forming your presidential personality really, really early, to the detriment of all your other interests and relationships if necessary. (See also Lyndon Johnson, as portrayed by Robert Caro, reviewed by Bill Clinton in today's New York Times. Also, see also Bill Clinton.)

If there's little in the way of juicy details, that's because the primary subject of the diary in question, kept by Obama's Australian ex-girlfriend Genevieve Cook, is his closed-off-ness – the fact that he doesn't share his inner life with her.

There is, however, a smattering of more-minor-but-still-intruiging details, filletted below for your convenience:

• Call the non-fiction ethics police: during an interview in the Oval Office, Maraniss writes, "Obama acknowledged that, while Genevieve was his New York girlfriend, the description in his memoir was a 'compression' of girlfriends, including one who followed Genevieve when he lived in Chicago."

• According to Cook, the young Barack pronounced his name "Bahr-uck", not "Buh-rock", thereby seemingly vindicating the many British friends I have annoyingly corrected over the last few years.

And finally:

On Sundays Obama would lounge around, drinking coffee and solving the New York Times crossword puzzle, bare-chested, wearing a blue and white sarong.